What's the why?

This week I've been reading Ryan Holiday's book Perennial Seller.  The tag line for the book is 'the art of making and marketing work that lasts', and the text really delivers on that promise.  His book is concerned with the vitality (I.e. longevity) of a work and not its virality (the five minute internet meme).  

He talks about making 'lasting work', and quotes several self-help books which are still selling decades after their publication.  And he says that "even the best admen will admit that, over the long term, all the marketing in the world won't matter if the product hasn't been made right."

"To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard.  It must be our primary focus," he says,  it's comforting for writers to read that focusing on honing our craft is what will make our work sell better.  It's not hours spent on Facebook or Twitter, or Instagram, or...  What matters is the hours we spend honing and polishing our prose.

One of the things Holiday focuses on is why we create. "You must have a reason - a purpose - for why you want the outcome and why you're willing to do the work to get it," he says.  He suggests that purpose might be: "because there is a truth that has gone unsaid for too long" or "because the world will be better for it" or "because it will help a lot of people".

"The author... (is) building something where nothing was before" he says.  And then makes the grand claim that "it's the ability to remake the planet, to alter the course of history."

Wow.  What heady purposes!  And yet, in a way, that's always what I've done.  There have never been enough strong independent women in SF for me, and most of the strong ones had the obligatory sexual relationship.  But I wanted to write about truly independent women.  Aromantic asexual women who don't rate being part of a conventional family.  Women who are global presidents, general managers of vast orbital shipyards, or captains of their own starships.

That's the why in my work.  To encourage women to claim their talents, to show them role models for what they could become if they used their talents to the full and claimed their power.  And looking back on my work, I realise that's always been the why behind it.